Summary:
This is to give you an idea of how and why we use SEF URLS
Difficulty/Time:
Contacts: Team Leader
URL Structure resources
- Search Engine Land - More in Depth Standards
- MOZlocal URL Best Practices
- Site Ground SEO URL Tips
Although you can use 2,083 characters in your URL, it is advised that you do not. So, what does it take to create a proper URL, and why would you want to do that?
Why Do we need optimized URLs?
Before we dive into the how, let’s look at the why.
User Experience
When creating an SEF (search engine friendly) URL you are creating another signal to let the user know what the page is about, as well as what page they are on.
For instance, when you look at SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) you typically will see the page title, description, and url when a page is being presented to you.
Looking at just the url you can see that it is https://www.tastermade.com/articles/food-fight-red-vines-vs-twizzlers
Based solely on the url, can you tell what this page is about?
What about this url?
www.buzzfeed.com/chrstinebyrne/how-to-grill-a-perfect-cheeseburger
So these urls, whether they are about how Twizzlers are superior to red vines or how to make the perfect cheeseburger, you will have an idea of what the page is about based on just what the url says.
What about this url?
www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes439031
Unless you know what an oes439031 is, or that has to do with occupational employment statistics for desktop publishers, you are going to have no clue what this link is. That is going to make it harder for the user to remember the site, or even what the page is about.
Rankings
There are a lot of factors the Google and other search engines weigh when placing your page in the SERPs results. One of those factors is the sortability and readability of URLS. This is not a major ranking factor, but every little bit helps.
Search engines like it when you have your information on your site organized in a way that is easy to understand, and sorts in its index. So when you are creating new pages, and you want to clump them together in a category you would do so by folders with similar items in it.
www.moz.com/blog/should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday
So the way a search engine would look at this url would be, within the moz.com folder there is a folder that holds all the blogs. Within the blog folder, there is a file called should-seos-care-about-internal-links-whiteboard-friday. So by doing that Google or Bing will know that this is a blog post about Why SEOs should care about internal links, and it is a whiteboard Friday presentation. That information makes it easier for google to sort it.
Clear Links
The third reason we want our urls to be easy to read is for sharing purposes. Sometimes when we share links on social media, in email, newsletters or our links get shared elsewhere we are not able to give them anchor text. So, when you have a url that is structured in a way that is easy to understand it will often act like anchor text for the user.
This example is stolen from https://moz.com/learn/seo/url , and it is a good example. If someone sent you the message on the left you might not want to click that link because you have no idea what it is about, however, the one on the right is clear, and if you want Dog Birthday Cake recipes you can click on the link and know where you are going.
How Do We create SEF urls?
Now that we have an idea as to why we are creating these URLs, let’s look at how we can structure them.
We are going to be talking a little bit about SEO-Friendly URLs and Dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are typically generated by the CMS (Content Management System) that a website is built on, like Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, and our own Dealer Spike Platform. Typically when you are working with these platforms you can either use the platform to generate SEF urls, or have it allow you to manually create them after they are initially created. If this is not an option you can use canonical tags to help create SEF urls for Dynamically created urls.
Moz posted this great chart that we will be referencing to talk about how an SEF URL is formed. https://d2eeipcrcdle6.cloudfront.net/learn/seo/URLs-page/Anatomy-of-a-URL-cheat-sheet_170316_122433.png?mtime=20170316122435
The part that we can effect comes after the top level domain (TLD). Following along, the index is the name of the page or folder. When we look at that, we have to consider how would we rename it, and what would we rename it. If this particular page is about grapes, maybe the page name should be ‘grapes’.
Next, .php is the file extension. That means that this particular page is written in php. Does that serve any value to the viewer of the page to know that? No, it doesn’t that is why most of the time you don’t see it, but if you do, you could use a canonical to adjust it, or just stop showing it.
And the last bit is CGI (Common Gateway Interface) parameters.These are generated by the CMS to display pages, most often product pages.
Now, how might we change this url to make it easier to understand? Let’s start with what our page is about. If it is a site the review shows on Broadway and maybe our domain is www.ds-show-reviews.com. And we are writing an article about Hamilton the musical, how might the url look.
Let’s work backward.
The page is about Hamilton, maybe the title of our article is “Don’t miss your Shot at seeing Hamilton the Musical” then maybe the name of the file that contains the article should be named dont-miss-your-shot-at-hamilton. How did we come up with that? Well, we took the important words in the name of the article and separated them by hyphens. We use hyphens for two reasons. First, they are easy to read in the url, and secondly, search engines have difficulty parsing underscores which are the other most logical separator. You use spaces in the sef url by typing %20, however not all browsers will show spaces in the url, and it is much harder to read like this dont%20miss%20your%20shot%20at%20hamilton.
Next, our site reviews not just Hamilton, but other plays, musicals, productions on Broadway as well. So we will want to sort Hamilton, but there are a lot of Musicals on Broadway, so that might not be narrow enough. We could put it in a folder, maybe drama, it is pretty dramatic, or historical. So, so when we put our folder, your url might start to look this way.
historical/dont-miss-your-shot-at-hamilton
Let organize it a little more, this, as mentioned before, is a musical, and not a play or production, so our url will then look like
musical/historical/dont-miss-your-shot-at-hamilton
Now when the user looks at the url they will have a solid idea of what the page is about, and so will search engines when they crawl your site.
Our final url would look like
www.ds-show-reviews.com/musical/historical/dont-miss-your-shot-at-hamilton
One other route we could take, using canonicals, and tools that are available on our platform is to form the url like this
www.ds-show-reviews.com/dont-miss-your-shot-at-hamilton-musical
This one also tells the user what the page is about.
Warnings
When creating a new SEF URL you must be sure that one does not already exist your you will be creating duplicate content(link to duplicate content info) so make sure you check for existing SEF URLs, see this doc for a guide: link to above mentioned mini wiki
When creating a new SEF URL you need to make sure that one does not already exist on your site. When this happens Google will crawl your site and see them as two difference URLs even if they go to the same pages. This can lead to duplicate content issues.
Guide to Removing Duplicate urls
Review
You are sorting through files on your desk, and trying to get organized. You have a training document, 5 bills, An article from your favorite magazine, several pictures, your car information, and the documentation for your home mortgage on your desk. How would you organize these in your file cabinet?
You are writing an article for a food blog, this article is about how to test avocados to see if they are ripe. What might the SEF portion of the URL look like?
Your url looks like www.vacationhomes.com/home.php?house=3455659&city=paris&state=texas . How might you fix this, and what would it look like?
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